Debris
notes from design research
published in Of Earth
In the distance, there is a large purple sheet loosely covering a grid of exposed concrete, fluttering slowly but reaching far distances in the breeze, anchored to the top of a precarious ruin. Sheets of bent concrete are falling over from higher floors, collapsing on top of each other, folding but frozen in motion. The resulting structure has a jagged and rigid geometry, but there’s a beauty in its brutality, especially pitted against the desolate sky this afternoon. It towers over the lower structures of the city as we drive past.
The Hard Rock hotel had collapsed here, we later learn, pausing the lives and journeys of the famous New Orleans streetcars. The first glimpse of this city I’d had was through the eyes of Tennessee Williams, too far back for me to remember closely .I decide I should try and re-read it while I’m here. I think of him again as I walk down Desire street.
—
This city is bounded by a river and a lake. They form the basis of directions. Rather than left or right, or north or south, you navigate a couple of streets lakeside and then you may turn upriver. A steam organ sits on a ferry on the Mississippi river. It sounds like a choir of primary school children playing recorders - awful and endearing, and it makes me laugh even as I’m holding my breath to combat the cold air. The humidity is at 80%, which makes it a steamy, sweaty, sultry city on warmer days. Buskers sit defiantly below the steps, their backs against the Cathedral at Jackson square. An improv slam poet plays drums while passing social commentary. The language here is an assertion of independence from any past colonizers, taking the airiness out of French and grounding those words in the earth. Burgundy is bur-gundy, Chartre is charter, Maison is mason. We look up everywhere and Mardi Gras beads dangle from the ceilings of trees.
Walking past the streetcar tracks, I arrive at the edge of the water, where there were once Nazi submarines floating underneath. This river traveled farther than the then-settlers knew, and had seen so much in its lifetime. Thousands of Native Americans lived along these edges once, cultivating sunflowers. Looking over to the other side, I see rundown warehouses which give way to the beginnings of marshland. We are surrounded by swampland teeming with alligators that are made into nuggets and served at the fried chicken spots for drunk tourists.
—
In a corner house in the French Quarter, S has found rolls and rolls of old Louisiana newspapers. Sourced from Craigslist, they fill three warehouses. They’re from the late 1800s to the early 1920s, a time of automobiles, feminism and drastic societal change. S is a print sentimentalist. He shows me mimiographs — the next generation of risograph prints. He makes collages with scattered printed type: letters escaping desperately out of objects and bound only by a frame. He speaks lyrically, like his soul was scattered across the earth and trying to be elsewhere, most of it diffusing around the streets of Montevideo, sipping maté from a thermos tucked under his arm.
A middle-aged former lawyer gives me satsuma oranges she picked from her tree and introduces me to her friendly cats. She speaks of her daily routine, taking her children to Disneyland, and trails off in a second of shadowy clarity, “… I sound so boring. I’m just a stay at home mom.” The cold humidity of the outside air is seeping into my bones. Four chickens cross the road ahead of me as we walk past conspicuous stretches of barren land, in between rows of houses, where entire homes once used to be, before Hurricane Katrina. Sheer empty space — the absence of ghosts is more chilling than any trace of their presence.
I walk with L through a winding courtyard, behind a rundown house, through a converted garage full of moist-smelling old sofa pillows, and into a shed beside a turquoise trailer atop a pile of autumn leaves. We walk into her room, a damp smell swimming in the air. The entire house is like a long, dark longitudinal corridor, another one of the shotgun houses of Louisiana. She wears flower-rimmed sunglasses indoors, where we can only see each other lit by a string of Christmas lights. This is an artist community, owned by her friend, who bought this entire block and let creative people live wherever they wanted on the property. There are piles of books everywhere. I see horror graphic novels by Junji Ito and nod silently to our kinship. She’s a go-go dancer and part time nanny, who recently made her way to Hollywood with a famous man she met one night while dancing. She did it to explore her feelings, to see if that relationship had potential. It was an escape from the awful partners she’d found in her city, the ones who lacked ambition and consistency. There was an unreasonable hope driving her, that she could venture outside this town and find someone who wouldn’t take her for granted.
Driven back home by a catastrophic hurricane, she returned to be close to her mother, brimming with familial love, resentment, and the urge to keep escaping. “Everybody’s always working now, all the time. They’re just working and working, and nobody’s really making money. We just need to make time to be humans together, while we still can.” She whips out her Mardi Gras costume, dresses like a flaming red nun, and dances on the streets once a year in a parade of reckless abandon and debauchery and dissolution of self.
This is a city where the people harbor a collective delusion, a fierce fighting spirit that bubbles right under their skin, passed down from generation to generation, forever pulsing in their blood.
——
The advertising here has a strange gospel-heading-slowly-into-90s-cyberspace vibe. On a long drive down a highway, we sit in silence listening to smooth jazz piano. All the billboards lining the edge advertise the services of personal injury lawyers - dressed in sharp suits, smiling with their arms crossed across puffed-up chests, all of them almost interchangeable. These signs create an invisible fence along a row of factories underneath, their livelihood dependent on line workers being maimed. A persuasive and concise tagline I see as they blur past: Call us when you’re 2hurt2work.
We eat hearty breakfasts every morning. Fried chicken, eggs, pork rib soup, grits, toast, and biscuits: which are delicious savory pastries like scones, optionally topped with gravy. It’s a Louisiana staple, a substitute for where other states use chili, only this is made up of scraps of simply seasoned roast beef, basic and comforting. They call it debris.
C explains how her home was a “shotgun house” as well, alluding to when residents used to shoot holes from the doors to the end of the corridors, creating a ventilation system for the wind to rush through and keep the air fresh. She makes a little rifle in the air with her hands and points to the far end of the house, where there would’ve been bullet holes in the walls. Later, she speaks about the chorus of voices in her head, her abusive childhood, a recent divorce, living on medication, and as she quietly bares her soul, there are threads of strength she doesn’t seem to be completely aware of. After we leave, even though we spent the evening rifling through little trinkets in magic shops, I still walk with the heaviness of her pain. It follows me into the night.
—
Late at night on Friday the 13th, we drive past a cemetery obscured by fog, to make our appointment with a witch. She advertises her shamanic training on Yelp and has many great reviews. Three of us arrive at her house and are instructed to walk down a side alley, through a doorway underneath a light. The light flickers. It turns out to be a flashlight taped to the edge of her balcony.
She turns out to be an Ecuadorian woman in loose clothing, small eyes with not enough eye-white, largely overweight and full of gravity. There‘s a TV on the wall beside her, displaying a subtly crackling fireplace. She introduces herself kindly, and describes her training in multiple faiths. I sit across from her and place my hands on a crystal bar and she gives me an energy reading: I was a magical being with a high vibration, but my energy was deeply self-protective. I had closed myself up. My source energy was radiant and full of powerful light, but it seemed I was a sponge and had been absorbing a lot of other people’s energies. All this bad energy from the outside had cluttered me, I was now full of debris. She later prescribes that I take many salty baths, or do ayahuasca.
Without a word, she performs a “clearing”, during which I feel my face grow warmer. Once we’re done, she tells me the angels had performed a fire treatment upon me, to cleanse my debris, that I had been placed inside a triangular crystal I would carry with me hereon. The heat I feel on my face, under my skin, is intense. Perhaps because the televised fireplace is the last thing I see before closing my eyes. Perhaps because I’m now floating inside a metaphorical healing crystal.
—
“I am nowhere, I want to be invisible. I don’t show anyone my face.”
A diminutive black man with graying hair stands at the edge of Louis Armstrong park, wearing a green scarf and beret. He seems quiet, until he isn’t. He speaks with the shivering energy of being possessed by multiple ancestral spirits all at once, shaking his fists and stamping on the ground; and then, with a long thoughtful exhale, he becomes quiet again, the animation gradually leaving his face. He was someone closely acquainted with devastation, and with rising from it: a local street artist turned millionaire.
He traces his lineage back to a great-great-great-great-grandfather, who’d been fathered by a French pirate as a product of brutal rape. Generations later, his family escaped the deep South as descendants of free people of color. He built himself up, made his first fortune, moved back to reclaim his history, and bought the tallest house in his neighborhood.
A Category 5 hurricane made landfall over the city shortly after. It tore his house down in one quick sweeping breath. State lines grew packed with military personnel, not allowing anyone in or out. Thousands were left stranded outside their homes, no longer allowed to return. During the evacuation, any remaining possessions were being looted, ensuring that people would truly come home to nothing. Corrupt lawyers were swooping in and taking possession of homes for themselves. Residents were forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to reclaim their own property. Months later, he found himself sleeping on an air mattress at a friend’s house, in the depths of debt. He fell asleep wrapped in a quilt and had a dream.
His grandmother visited him with the perplexing suggestion that he should make quilts. The next day, reborn as an artist, he picked up the debris of his wrecked house and started to hammer it together into quilts. They come together as haphazardly geometric, broken grids, each wood chip carrying a wild splash of color, screaming with memory. He took them into the street and sold them one by one, eventually amassing a million dollars and taking back his home. Rising, straight out of the debris.
This is not a city that tries to forget. It feels unchanged with time, gathering layers of hybrid culture from each generation of colonizers. In the French Quarter, a square has a French building diagonally opposite an African building, bordered to the side by Spanish buildings. A structure with a sign says “change”, titled with letters left over from the original sign: New Slave Exchange.
The first citizens of this state were the undesirables: the pickpockets, pirates, and prostitutes, the rejects from French prisons. Slave markets drew tourists in from different parts of the country, giving way to sex tourism. Black slave women would be raped and bear mixed-race children. They would grow up as gens de couleur, the free people of color. They would use their newly-acquired precarious freedom in entrepreneurial ways, buying up slaves or running brothels. Slaves far outnumbered their violent colonizers, so creating segregation within them was a strategic move to keep revolutionary sentiment in check. Generation upon generation of mixed-race children vied to become purer and whiter, growing a sense of superiority over their black brethren, disregarding the pain from the indifference of their white absentee fathers.
Women who spend enough time together experience a peculiar phenomenon, where their menstrual cycles become synchronized. In brothels, this became inevitable. They’d listen to music together collectively while “on the rag”, birthing what we know as ragtime music. The music of the slaves was, in its rawest form, a percussive, loud sacrifice to the war gods. In response to the oppressors, that music changed, and became a place in which to keep their own secrets. Beats communicated in unspoken ways, relying on the telepathic understanding that came from eye contact and shared trauma. Rhythm became more playful, more minimal, more surprising. Unexpected syncopation crept in to say something different, in covert tones. Conversations were accompanied by varying degrees of swaying hips, an equatorial movement.
Beyond the French quarter was barren land that came to be known as the Congo Square street market. Here, slaves were permitted to sell their wares or performances on Sundays, the day of God. We pass through this square, now an innocuous park, as we walk to Jean-Marcel’s home studio.
The door is a quilt of multicolored wood, with sculpted heads emerging from unexpected places. I look up toward the top of the house, knowing the life it has weathered. Jean-Marcel is telling us how things changed when Napoleon, the dope ass war strategist, decided to sell Louisiana to the United States. He details how his ancestors, the female knights, fought valiantly in the Battle of Waterloo. How his fellow black men would once hold torches for the Ku Klux Klan in exchange for a dollar, as they would go to any lengths to save up to buy their own freedom. How centuries of resentment compounded in Haiti. I look around the studio, where his art viscerally comes together out of residual debris. There is a sanctity about this part of the room.
He has been raised by matriarchs, raised with what he calls scientific magic. He maintains an altar with photographs and pieces of memories from anyone who has been special to him. Admiring the flowers in a polaroid picture of his mother, he says “Roses are just beautiful barbed wire.” At the back of the room, hang three elaborate costumes, each emblazoned with “Nganga” across the chest, the term for the voodoo medicine man. Intricate and heavily feathered, the front is embroidered with semiconductor-like complexity. Bright cyan, bright yellow, blood red and mustard, these are dresses that might confer an impression of spiritual authority.
The first row of the bookshelf has a series of volumes titled “Hoodoo, Voodoo, Witchcraft and Conjuration.” He walks to the doorway and opens the book, sunlight slanting on to the pages, and reads from it. The text is written in an accent, as it would be phonetically spoken. These are interviews with slaves who practiced hoodoo, a form of folk magic. We read a recipe for a protection spell, briefly alluding to household ingredients and spices. He says not to trust this recipe verbatim, because recorded information was often distorted during this time. There was a certain distrust and protection built into ebonics, a deliberate obfuscation of meaning, as a means of staying safe.
Many statues of humans studded with nails are stacked along the floor and along the walls. “Each of these is an entire government,” he says. Communities would make agreements like land purchases, dowry exchanges or marriages, and each would be marked by a nail being hammered into the statue: a record of a transactional contract. The statues had a pouch around the abdomen, the muyo or the spiritual gut. This would contain all the magic ingredients, enough to invoke the spirits of the ancestors. If an agreement were broken, the corresponding nail would be removed. The hole was a portal for the ancestors to leave the body and confer justice and their wrath upon the agreement-breakers.
I leave with a gift, a small packet of protection wrapped in a green cloth and a jute rope, a little bag of mojo. It contains salt, pepper, a cocktail of protective spices, and the cemetery dirt of a soldier, one of his descendants. The idea of salt as protection comes from the salt-eaters. The only slaves who survived the long journey at sea were ones whose bodies had high sodium retention. There is a rationalization for every ingredient. This packet could be activated by using a substance to invoke smell memories. He used rose oil to invoke his grandmother, who used a stinky rose perfume. He conjures up his demons within the safety of ancestral presence, breaks bread with them, and seems to accept them. Once the protection is activated, our ancestors would begin to arrive into our dreams.
—-
That night, I dream of walking through the French Quarter, in absolute silence, and everyone is invisible except for their forearms. Moving in slow motion. In the far distance, I see gigantic black and white marionettes approaching. I remember these over-enlarged faces from my mother’s old puppeteering photos. They disappear, and all that is left is forearms, gesturing animatedly through the street. I walk past the curving wrought iron of the gates, windows and balconies.